See me.

Be sad. For days, weeks, months, years.

Admit and submit to your unhappiness. Get down in the deep dark depths of your unhappiness and roll around in all that gunk until it fills up your nose holes and your ear holes and your eye holes….. until it gets down so deep into your lungs that you can’t even take a tiny sip of air through a straw as small as toothpick. Once you’re all gunked up inside and in a state of somewhat paralysis from all the junky unhappy, then and ONLY THEN, must you attempt to find a tiny sliver of light in the air above you.

Remember, you are rotting at the bottom of your well, covered in mud-like chunks of pity and shame and despair and neverending hatred for yourself. You can barely open your left eye, your right one is sealed all the way shut. But somehow, if you’re able to pry it open just a tiny little slit, perhaps you will witness the miracle of light and can grab onto that motherfucker with all you have left in you, which is basically nothing at this point, but no one can ever call you a quitter because you go down hard with everything you do and goddammit, you’re going down with this too just so you can say you pulled yourself back up into the light.

You.

You went all the way down into the darkest part of the well and you lived there and you ate the fungus and the decay and you thrived so well on its bruised flesh until it sat inside you and festered and rotted and smelled of all the dead things along every highway in America and you welcomed its necrosis like a tiny baby all made up of dumb words and bad choices and regrets too many to give breath to. You brought it to your breast and you let it suckle the life out of you until it had grown strong enough to set free in this tiny dark well where we came to shun the light and grow in our despair and restlessness because we know that is the only way to know beauty and love and all the things that aren’t the mad-gunky that we gave our very own heartbeat to.

We had to do that, you see.

How else can we see light if we’ve never been lost in the darkness?

How can we feel the music so deeply if its melody plays for us all the time?

How do we know beauty if we only ever see the roses in bloom but never when they wilt and die?

The rot and decay breathes life.

Did you know that when you die there is a place that will take your body and compost it so that your dead flesh and bones can give life to trees and shrubs and worms and bugs?

When I die, take me there and let me rot until I have fed myself back into life.

I don’t imagine there’s a better way to think of death than that; to know that no matter how small and insignificant you feel here, that someday your flesh and bones will be the reason something else lives.

See me.

I am just one among many.

I live down here at the bottom of a well, you see. It’s dark and dank and there’s only this little tiny sliver of light and I don’t know if I’m ready to climb up out of here yet.

Just let me rest here for a bit longer, would you?

I’m coming up soon.

I promise I am.